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Inscriptions

In 1935, Professor Benjamin Meritt took the first steps to build a Repository of Squeezes—impressions of inscriptions that allow scholars to more easily study them. He wrote to Director Abraham Flexner that it “will be second only to that in Berlin.” Today, the Institute houses one of the world’s largest collections of squeezes.

We do not know who made the first paper squeeze of an inscription. The practice is quite old; large numbers of them were made by Richard Lepsius on an expedition to Egypt (1842–45) and by Philippe Le Bas in Greece (1843). The invention of the...